Lead halide perovskites have a range of spectacular properties and interesting phenomena and are a serious candidate for the next generation of photovoltaics with high efficiencies and low fabrication costs. An interesting phenomenon is the anomalous hysteresis often seen in current–voltage scans, which complicates accurate performance measurements but has also been explored to obtain a more comprehensive understanding of the device physics. Herein, we demonstrate a wavelength and illumination intensity dependency of the hysteresis in state-of-the-art perovskite solar cells with 18\% power conversion efficiency (PCE), which gives new insights into ion migration. The perovskite devices show lower hysteresis under illumination with near band edge (red) wavelengths compared to more energetic (blue) excitation. This can be rationalized with thermalization-assisted ion movement or thermalization-assisted vacancy generation. These explanations are supported by the dependency of the photovoltage decay with illumination time and excitation wavelength, as well as by impedance spectroscopy. The suggested mechanism is that high-energy photons create hot charge carriers that either through thermalization can create additional vacancies or by release of more energetic phonons play a role in overcoming the activation energy for ion movement. The excitation wavelength dependency of the hysteresis presented here gives valuable insights into the photophysics of the lead halide perovskite solar cells.

Cesium and bismuth iodides (Cs3Bi2I9 and MA3Bi2I9) are new low-toxic and air stable compounds in the perovskite solar cell family with promising characteristics. Here, the electronic structure and the nature of their optical transitions, dielectric constant, and charge carrier properties are assessed for photovoltaic applications with density functional theory (DFT) calculations and experiments. The calculated direct and indirect band gap values for Cs3Bi2I9(2.17 and 2.0 eV) and MA3Bi2I9 (2.17 and 1.97 eV) are found to be in good agreement with the experimental optical band gaps (2.2, 2.0 eV and 2.4, 2.1 eV for Cs3Bi2I9 and MA3Bi2I9, respectively) estimated for solution-processed films. There is an error cancelation in the DFT calculated band gap similar to that for lead perovskites. However, fully relativistic DFT calculations indicate that the size of the spin orbit coupling (SOC) error cancelation for bismuth perovskite (0.5 eV) is less than for lead perovskite (1 eV), and other factors are therefore also important. Band structure calculations show high effective masses of the charge carriers along the c-axis but on the other hand lower electron effective mass in the a–b planes, revealing the interesting possibility for a directional charge transport. Calculations of dielectric constants, absorption coefficients, carrier effective masses, and exciton binding energies emphasize the fundamental differences between the lead and bismuth iodide perovskites and clarify the reasons behind the lower power conversion efficiency of bismuth iodide perovskite solar cells. Also the calculations show that the orientational disorder of the MA dipoles in the lattice has meaningful impacts on the near valence and conduction band edge of the electronic structure.